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The Hidden Rules of Bigotry
Who is good? And who is better? We make these value judgments all the time, and for good reason, about individuals. But most of us have been taught not to make such judgments about groups of people. Equality is a core principle of American society, and it’s unjust—or at least politically incorrect—to subscribe to social hierarchies. But such explicit hierarchies have played a powerful role in American history, and many believe that they still do—in a more subterranean fashion. Indeed, some psychological scientists suspect that rules of superiority and inferiority are still alive and well in the American psyche, shaping our judgments of race and religion and even age in subtle ways.
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Insecurity at the Borderline
The Huffington Post: Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who has represented Mississippi since 1978, this week used a clever psychological strategy to fend off a primary challenge from the right wing of the party. "The Tea Party," he confessed on a final campaign swing, "is something I don't really know a lot about." Nobody believes that. Cochran hasn't been living in a cave. What he was doing, very effectively, was marginalizing his Tea Party rival, playing on the insecurities of a GOP "fringe" faction within the party's establishment. And his opponent took the bait, reacting with hostility toward the powerful incumbent and behaving ungraciously in defeat.
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The Mad-Genius Paradox: Creativity Could Be Tied To Both Sanity And Madness
Fast Company: You can probably recite, off the top of your head, at least a few creative geniuses who seemed out of their mind. We used Sylvia Plath, Vincent Van Gogh, and Michael Jackson as examples in our piece on creativity and madness last fall. That story surveyed recent evidence linking the two areas--especially the idea that creative types and other people who are vulnerable to mental illness share certain cognitive traits, such as a failure to filter out useless information. Not all scientists are on board with the "mad genius" concept.
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Developmental Psychology’s Weird Problem
Slate: Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past few years, I’ve gotten used to lots of things that would probably seem strange in other cities. Commuting on a unicycle? Sure. Rampant midday nudity? Everywhere. Vegan dinner fundraiser for your Burning Man art car? Of course. So I hardly bat an eye when a 4-year-old says, “My favorite food is edamame.” As a developmental psychologist, I test children to learn basic facts about kids, such as how they learn language, navigate social interactions, and gain knowledge. These things seem like they should work about the same way for any young human.
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Navigating the Brain’s GPS
More than a decade ago, researchers discovered that London taxi drivers, who have to navigate one of the most byzantine street grids in the world, have atypical brain characteristics. Specifically, the posterior hippocampi—a brain region associated with spatial memory—are larger compared to other people, scientists found. A new study offers some explanation for this phenomenon. The findings pinpoint the precise brain regions used in navigation, and in doing so change how scientists believed we use our brain to find our way around. Previously, researchers had disagreed over whether the brain calculates a route or calculates the straight-line to a destination.
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Becoming an Expert Takes More Than Practice
Researchers find that the amount of practice accumulated over time does not seem to play a huge role in accounting for individual differences in skill or performance.
